A tool for northern Australia: Northern Environment Water Tool (NEWT)

Please find the full NEWT portal here or at http://arcg.is/9K8K5.

Welcome to NEWT, the information portal for environmental water management in northern Australia.

Environmental flows are the amount and timing of water flows required to maintain the species, functions, and resilience of freshwater ecosystems and the livelihoods of human communities that depend on those healthy ecosystems. The NEWT portal provides access to information (reports, articles etc) and data (databases etc) concerning environmental water management across the region.

We have organized the portal within a framework known as the Ecological Limits of Hydrological Alteration (ELOHA; Arthington et al 2006 [1], Poff et al 2010 [2]), which is, we believe, the most appropriate framework for considering environmental water management in a region as large as northern Australia and for which specific flow-ecology information is limited.

We draw heavily upon TRaCK related research but also provide access and links to other relevant information. Throughout this portal, we provide links to the Environmental Water Guidelines formulated from TRaCK related research.

1. Arthington, A.H., Bunn, S.E., Poff, N.L. &Naiman, R.J. The challenge of providing environmental flow rules to sustain river ecosystems. Ecological Applications 16, 1311-1318 (2006).
2. Poff, N.L., et al. The ecological limits of hydrologic alteration (ELOHA): a new framework for developing regional environmental flow standards. Freshwater Biology 55, 147-170 (2010).